Century 0 of 13 · the whole story, front to back
Full narrative series that carry you from the founding to the fall. If you only ever press play on one series, press play here.
5 entries · 544 hours · 5 with a written verdict
The answer to where to start has been the same since 2007, and it costs seventy hours. Mike Duncan recorded The History of Rome alone, while working in the fish trade, and took the story from the founding myth to the last western emperor across 179 episodes. Nobody has displaced it since. Seventy hours sounds like a commitment until you divide it by a commute, at which point it is about three weeks.
What a long narrative gives you that an interview cannot is memory. By the third century you know which families keep reappearing and which provinces always cause trouble, so when the system fails you feel it happen. That is the entire case for starting with something enormous.
Finish it and there are two obvious next moves. Robin Pierson picks up in the year Duncan stops and has now run longer than the show he set out to continue. Fiona Radford and Peta Greenfield take the Republic one year at a time and argue with Livy while they do it. Everything on this page begins at the beginning and keeps going; each one is listed in full, in order, with running times.
I feel like…
Cogitare, how it was thought and ordered
how it is made
who is talking
how much time you have
Two men work through every single emperor in order and then score him out of a hundred on legacy, war record and sheer madness. It sounds like a gimmick and it is the most efficient way ever devised to remember two hundred emperors, because the argument about the scoring is what makes them stick.
Two episodes a week, Sundays and Thursdays, and 237 of them are about Rome. Tristan Hughes brings the archaeologist from the dig or the academic who wrote the book to each one, which is why it stays specific.
179 episodes, Romulus to Romulus Augustulus, made by one man in his spare time before podcasting was a job. Everything else is a footnote to it. Start at episode one and clear your calendar.
Every emperor in order, in half-hour episodes, by a classicist and a broadcaster who asks what a normal person would ask. The gentlest way in of all of these, and the easiest to keep going with.
The BBC's six-part dramatisation from 2006, each episode a single turning point carried by actors. Dated in places, and still the clearest television account of how the whole arc fits together.
